I AM NO LONGER AFRAID OF THE BRITISH
POSSIBLE INFOHAZARD FOR THOSE AFFECTED BY INFOHAZARDS
I am no longer afraid of the British. I am an American southerner. That means I have an ancestral blood memory of leaving that island. Europeans are still mad about it. They’re still mad about Americans and being European and Americans not getting it. We don’t want to get it. Write about how we’re dumb and uncultured. We have America, retard. Enjoy Europe and being smart.
Girlfriend sent me a video of some British guy and I couldn’t watch it. I am a sensitive person and seeing his narrow face ruined the next hour. I barely managed to avoid hearing him speak. Sending me a video is assault. We already won the revolution. It’s all cycles.
Žižek schniffles and says, yes but what about after the revolution? Don’t care European stained shirt bro, I am an American so I am retarded so if you’re talking about anything other than a movie I’m gonna roll my eyes. *Grabs the microphone out of my hand* then I kick him in the stomach and the crowd cheers because I am handsome and funny (you know it’s a joke because the crowd hates me for that, the individual women love me though, communists hate this one trick (they hate existence because they are ugly but they don’t have to be so stinky)). Back when I used Instagram I posted a video where I did an impression of Žižek (not the same one I sent to my former friend) talking to the cartoon character Meatwad (because I am good at impressions (to be fair those are easy impressions) and handsome and funny so I can do stuff like that) and no one got it or thought it was funny which is how I knew it was good and funny. Maybe I’ll share it with you some day. Probably won’t show my face though to maintain the tension. A life of tension. Are the goon bros even wrong. Are they even wrong. They would be cool if they didn’t come. If they built up all day to no finale. If they just maintained tension. Then the gooners would be heroes.
The book club guy made a video where he’s European and smart and Sam Hyde is American and dumb and doesn’t understand how cathedrals are made or something. Yeah the forest is made of trees, thanks European. I was kinda shocked at this video. I like Q and Sam. Really didn’t get the point of his video. And then I scrolled down to look at the comments, like everyone does. And what did I see? My British internet bro leaving the same comment I am making right now.
American-British alliance bros, we are SO back.
Probably not a big deal. Shouldn’t be surprised to see a comment from someone I recognize in what’s probably a small population of people who enjoy literature and making videos online and commenting on each other’s videos. Probably fewer than 20k people around the world. Not that crazy.
Crazier than that though is when I saw a woman I knew in a nude-sharing thread of 4chan’s /b/ in 2017. I know her. I don’t usually click those threads (porn is easy to find and everywhere) but I clicked on that one and suddenly I know her. There were several pictures of her (which I saved and used as reference photos in drawings because I am not a deranged pervert, I am an artist) which was just shocking to see, psychologically jarring. Like scrolling through pictures of local sex offenders and suddenly you see yourself. Oh that’s a good idea for a story. Don’t steal it. But there she was. I know her. (Great tits, by the way.) Global village, indeed.
This was a more jarring internet-global-village-next-door experience than the YouTube comment from someone I recognize because /b/ is not an algorithmically curated process meant to absorb the most of my attention possible through the maintenance of a robust data profile. It’s more public. More like a collective id than a solipsistic tunnel made of mirrors. Do you remember in the movie Ex Machina how the AI robot waifu was designed based on the protagonist’s porn viewing habits? Have you heard of predictive programming? The reality will be much simpler than that. There won’t be some epic robot. All you need is images on a screen. A text message from mom.
What does it mean when every internet post is made by me and for me. What does it mean when Darren Allen comments on an article by Caleb Caudell the day after I finished reading his book Self & Unself (the month after I finished reading Caudell’s The Neighbor) and I’m sitting there giggling like a complete psychotic idiot reading the comment thread and not understanding a single word I’ve ever read. What does that mean. Then I go on Substack and I see Isaac Simpson make a post with the same picture I used in a Facebook status update like eight years ago.
What does it mean when dead internet theory means I’m the only person using the internet reading posts that I made. Doesn’t even matter. The presence of others doesn’t even matter. There they are doing their thing. Doing it all the time. And you can’t stop turning it into something else. A performance for one. What would you even do if someone actually sang a song for you? If someone actually looked you in the eyes and sang? I shudder to imagine. (I am shuddering imagining you. I could handle it. I would give my singer a kiss (she’s very pretty).)
:)
These posts weren’t made for me but they might as well be. Or, soon enough, they might as well be. Everything on a screen is the result of three colors (red, green, blue) varying in intensities in little rectangles. Video, pictures, text. Anything on the screen. Your family vacation photos. The last picture of dad. The email from your former lover. That picture of the ass you like.
A fundamental closed loop. The screen offers a question, the same one that life offers: is it a closed loop? The screen has been engineered. Each pixel contains three colors. There is nothing new under the sun. Does the set of all sets contain itself? Is life like that? I don’t have an answer. I am skeptical of any answer. That’s why we need art. We actually need it. Sorry guys. Philosopher bros been real quiet since artists made art. Damn they won’t shut up. Guess I must do this. I must write Virtual Mineshaft with a first article called “I’M CONTENT” which was totally unplanned as the beginning of a novel but it turns out it’s a good idea and I had to scroll through my own Facebook page to find the post to take a screenshot to include in this article because it’s a longform character study of a guy posting stuff online. I wonder how it ends. (For the people who don’t get it, I was scrolling my own feed looking for content to put into this post. (My posts became content which I then used to create this content just for you. The loop sure looks closed.) You are your biggest internet fan and you know it. You love your content. No one has ever looked at any of your pictures as much as you.) Is it better or worse if I planned it. I don’t really care what you think but I’ll read it. (I didn’t plan it and that’s why it’s getting better and better, just like life should. Life should get better and better. You’re so fucked up. You read that and immediately thought “but you get old. Life can’t get better and better.” Look how fucked up you are. You can’t even imagine life getting better. Because it sucks. (And you love how much it sucks.) You’re sick. (The first thing I wrote in my first article which is part of this internet novel is “Sick shit.” Did I plan it? Or am I just that good. Or does life get better and better? Is it a closed loop?))
I wonder what happens at the end of the book. I can’t believe how self-indulgent this is. What if he just maintained tension like the hypothetical gooner heroes. It never ends. And he trains an AI off of his posts and even after he dies the AI continues posting and no one ever knows. Did he plan that? Did he plan to loop it all back around to some stupid goon comment at the beginning of the article? Is he just falling with style? He is retarded. Then why do you love it when a movie ends with the same scene it started with? You love it when that happens. You watch YouTube videos analyzing movies whose first scene and final scene are the same. A closed loop. You eat that shit up. Is life like that? American Southerner here, British in generations past. I’ll show you mine if you show me yours. The tower of Babel was built on the foundation of the previous tower. If God were an artist you would be so mad. You would ask, “but what does the painting mean?” and God would respond with another painting.
It doesn't matter how many followers, subscribers, even how much money you accrue on this here internet. You're still only going to interact with ten or fifteen people at a time, you'll still see the same few things over and over. Just like NATURE, really. Dunbar remains undefeated. We're more alive than we think, including the internet, it's just that our initial expectations were a little too high.
I don't ask what the paintings mean. I eat them. We aren't the same.